Gifting

We are seasoned Desktop&Dice Pen&Paper role-players here at Ordo Octopia, having witnessed the hobby-as-life go from being something that only nerd boys do to becoming something very cool and acceptable by everyone, yes even girls too now.

The explosion of video-game culture has replaced natural development of imagination, maths and team-work skills-sets with goggle-box zombi-vision. So we decided to create a crude game to explore Energy Dynamics in Group Cultures in our down-time. We call it the Energy Game which refers tongue-in-cheek to the other Energy Game of meta-theater played by people in real life.

The following is The Simple Rules (first edition) of our minimalist approach. We would love to hear feedback from anyone who gets it together enough to play-test this system and suggest improvements. The experiment is whether other peoples improvements mirrors our own.

We use variants which we call The Advanced System which expands on three features;

'Facilities' with alternate System Mechanics, some involving 'Skills' & 'Tools' (is why "Learn" is in there);

'Give & Take' rules- 'Gifting' through 'Skills' and 'Tools' to benefit multiple players simultaneously,- 'Stealing' energy from other players as exploitation strategies developed during social interaction;

'This or That' rulesIncreasingly difficult character development and morality options for which purpose is introduced a deck of "Decision Scenario" cards. It expands greatly on the 'Stealing Energy' rules and is also used for Story Telling purposes.Examples: - You get the job if you sleep with the boss behind your partner's back.- A hundred pounds if you plant evidence on an innocent.- Jail for revenge or forgive an abuser.

The Advanced System generally tends toward requiring a computer to do the calculus, obviously this is leading us toward development of an in-house custom AI and eventually a phone app product.